


my fingers claw your skin (try to tear my way in)

by randomfatechidna



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F, in this house we love and stan major kira nerys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-14 15:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16495265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomfatechidna/pseuds/randomfatechidna
Summary: Nerys wants to gouge the memories out from her with her teeth, learn her insides the same way she memorised the parts of a phaser when she was thirteen. Wants to tear and prise and perforate her careful Starfleet exterior until there’s only Jadzia left.Jadzia spends the night at Kira's.





	my fingers claw your skin (try to tear my way in)

**Author's Note:**

> the direct result of reading the entire kiradax archive three times in a row, trying to sort out kira in my head as a whole person, and late, sleepless nights. 
> 
> title from howl - florence + the machine.

The room is dark. The only sounds are of breathing and the gentle, incessant hum of the station, lulling them softly to sleep. Eyelids heavy with it, Kira cannot. She props herself up against the woman in her bed; her thoughts are selfless. “How could I possibly deserve you,” she whispers, softer than the sound of the station, spinning and making its orbit. She traces a line of Trill spots with her finger, and the station hums in solidarity, and the truth is on her tongue. She might outrank the woman in her bed, but Jadzia has a wisdom and a capacity for love that has always been lifetimes above her.

She doesn’t stir, beneath Kira’s hands, and her breathing stays steady, alive. Asleep. Earlier, Jadzia had kissed her so hard her teeth hurt, nails digging into her hips, and her ears still ring from it; she feels the blood pulsing through her gums, tastes the aftertaste of her.

This woman, larger than life, wanted _her_ , a country Bajoran from inland Dakhur. A resistance fighter, and a killer, blood on her hands. She wants her nonetheless. Jadzia would argue that she’s a killer too, that there’s a man whose memories she has that was a killer once. On Bajor, though, killing is not a thing you remember, it’s a thing you’ve done. Dax might know something of killing, but privileged, regal Jadzia knows only the memory. It’s not the same. Nerys would rather Jadzia knew nothing of it at all - it hurts to think she might know something of taking a life. Nevertheless, they attract each other like magnets. Or she might say, _we're_ _in each other’s orbit_ , for Jadzia’s benefit, ever the scientist. In each other’s orbit they are, except their gravity is too strong to keep up the illusion of distance, and they pull and they pull until, here they are, meeting violently in the middle.

Jadzia’s skin is cool, flush against Nerys’ own, and she rests her forehead gently on the flesh of her shoulder. Her hand comes to lay on her stomach, and she feels the worm settle quietly under her hand, trying to find peace. They’re powerful together, herself and Jadzia: two women of rank, and of purpose. It makes her dizzy. There’s so much inside this other woman, to explore, to tease, to tear out slowly and to devour heartily.

She wants to know every inch of this woman’s life - all of them. She wants to hear how the Unjoined call her Parent, she wants to call her Mother. She wants to hear her privileged life and then how she fought viciously against the grain to be who she is. Nerys wants to gouge the memories out from her with her teeth, learn her insides the same way she memorised the parts of a phaser when she was thirteen. To tear and prise and perforate her careful Starfleet exterior until there is only Jadzia left.

There are times, on the station, when they’re not in mortal danger, or trading insults with ambassadors behind barbed-wire smiles, when Nerys feels like the least helpful person on the station. She hears Dax and O’Brien and Bashir and their technology and their words and their words for technology and she sometimes goes whole minutes without understanding a word. She wonders if the provisional government got it wrong, sending a war fresh girl straight up the ranks, sending a girl who dropped out of what was left of school to fight a war for her life, onto a station full of Starfleet geniuses, who have had more than double her years of education, more than triple. She asks the computer to spellcheck reports more often than she doesn’t, and she’s too proud to ask for genuine clarification for some things, stealing away to her quarters when she can to have the computer explain it for her.

And then there’s Jadzia.

She knows calculus and relativity and can realign sensor arrays in her sleep. There’s not a single subspace anomaly she doesn’t know how to analyse. She has degrees in words she’s never heard of in Bajoran. Kira knows she has her strengths: she’s a tactician and a strategist and a soldier - but there are days she feels so small in the light Starfleet. In the light of her. There are days now, when she’s so overcome by her, that she can only feel hopelessly embarrassed at herself, hoping that a Starfleet lieutenant would have the grace, the mercy, to let a resistance fighter have even a glimpse into her life.

Nerys can feel her blood in her still, and her ears still ring. Jadzia makes her so aware of herself, her pulse, of the way it pumps inside her to the beat of a dance, the way it reaches the very tips of her fingers. It reminds her of lying face down in the dust, face scratched by low-lying bush, waiting - always waiting - for Cardassians, and being able to feel her pulse beating in her stomach, thrumming against the soil. Jadzia too, has a way of making her forget any insecurity she might have about the phaser wounds and knife scars on her skin. For the record, she’s proud of them; they’re proof that she lived and fought against the Occupation, that she didn’t take the abuse of her people lying down, that she had courage, and bravery, and she stuck to it. To an outsider, however, she knows they’re something that could be pitied. Jadzia, in her gentleness, just wanted to love them, like the rest of her. _I love them_ , she had said, seeing them. _Love them love them love them_.

Not love _you_ , but Nerys believes in the power of passing time. She doesn’t deserve Jadzia, not at all, not when she is only one and Jadzia is many, many. All that between them, but she won’t deny that maybe something might come of them. She’d like something to come of them, Prophets permitting.

She’s been watching her sleep for too long, and Jadzia stirs, raising a hand to rub at her eye. Kira doesn’t move away, doesn’t hide the fact that she was watching, and watches the woman below come to the realisation, slowly.

Jadzia hums softly, seeing the woman above her, seeing the intensity of her gaze. “Afraid it wasn’t real?” she asks, moving her hand to cup her cheek. She’s so sure of herself, so ready to be accepted, that Kira can’t help herself but to accept her.

Kira shakes her head, leaning into the other woman’s touch, savouring it. “No,” she says, wistful, loving. “Hoping it would never end.” She dips her head, bashful at how this woman brings out the romantic in her, and presses her nose into the cool crook of her neck.

Jadzia hums again, content where she is. She knows how skittish and proud Nerys can be, and her candour brings a bite of fresh air to her life, to the station. When she is honest, she’s vulnerable, and Jadzia often catches Nerys skirting around her vulnerabilities. They are, after all, a weakness, and she had weakness beaten out of her during the Occupation. Jadzia doesn’t find it weak, though, to say the truth, what she’s feeling. It is, to her, purely and incontrovertibly brave.

Jadzia’s youth, however, was safe and comfortable and loving, and so she has to accept now that she was raised to feel safe and comfortable and loved wherever she happens to be. Kira’s youth hinged on her ability to beat vulnerability and survive, so now, there is vulnerability and a fight for survival wherever she has been since. Her sincerity, now, comes deeply appreciated and Jadzia kisses her, softer than before.

“It doesn’t have to,” she says. “End, I mean.” Jadzia’s mouth barely brushes Kira’s before she pulls away. She lets Nerys guide her back toward her like the ebb and flow of a gentle tide, hand wound delicately in her long hair. Jadzia’s hair, around the station, is almost always up. Off duty, or on duty, it doesn’t matter: it’s always neatly tucked away behind her ears and up in a ponytail. Professional. Now, there are pins and ties and miscellanea strewn about her quarters and she thinks she’ll be finding them around for months.

Children on Bajor used to wear their hair long, take five strands and braid it. Cutting her own was practical: less hair meant less of a grip for a Cardassian claw to bind her. It also meant she wasn’t a child anymore. Jadzia’s hair, however, is long and soft and Kira would never want her to cut it. The way it curls towards the ends - something she’s never noticed before - starts a gentle fluttering in her stomach that would make her think she was unwell, if not for the heady satisfaction it gives her. She wants to braid her hair, take five strands in her hand and make art from her. This, she realises, hair splayed across her pillow, is what Jadzia looks like when she is undone. This is what she looks like when _Nerys_ has undone her. She’s drunk on it. Dizzy.

Nerys hooks a leg around Jadzia’s, feels the texture of her spots all the way down to her toes, pulls her close. This woman is expansive. She takes up rooms when she enters them; she is bigger than the sum of all of her parts. Her smile - and she smiles now greedily into Nerys’ teeth - casts light onto all the deepest hidden parts of her.

And she is hers. Any doubts Nerys may have had, any fear of inferiority, disappears at the meeting of their skin, at Jadzia’s affection. Jadzia runs the pad of her index finger along the ridges at her nose, and she shivers. There will still be her doubts and fears and abashment in the morning, wating, and there are many, many, inside a joined Trill, but here, right now, is Jadzia.

The station hums still, incessant, even in the quiet of their embrace. And she loves her, and that is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> • i've been looking at this for too long i just have to post it or i never will lol  
> • yes i am aware that this fic is pretentious and fake deep and i am not receiving concrit at this time lmfao  
> • references to jadzia being called “parent dax” borrowed with admiration from jessica krucek and richard pugh’s work “the first tile”, where the corruption of joineds and the commission is explored thoroughly and artfully. i've read it twice and enjoyed it thoroughly both times. it's not a kiradax work but definitely recommended reading for this class


End file.
